Golden’s History – One of my personal interests is the history of Golden and the arrival of the big red crane that has been brought in to assist with the construction of the new Kicking Horse River Bridge. Just its mere presence is a kind of signal to us that ’25 is a milestone year in our history. The personality of the town is bound to change at least somewhat with the new bridge.
Golden’s history started, of course, with the railway. The Columbia River Lumber Company, the plywood mill, and many sawmills through the years have anchored the forest industry. Several chapters of sports facilities and the railway repair depot have all added to our local community fabric, along with many and varied other essential components which are needed in a community.
But along with those large components are some smaller ones, some almost completely taken for granted, like the bridge which we have now been crossing for 73 years, and which, with all of the other things that have made our community, have been part of our history, part of our lives.
So what was that personality? What was Golden like to live in as an individual through the years? What were some of the little things that made up people’s lives in some of the years that are now out of most of our memories? But not everyone’s!
Certainly not Ed Blysak’s memory.
Those of you who have been here for many years will know Ed; for those who are not acquainted with him, let me introduce him to you.
Ed was born in a house here in Golden on 7th Street North in 1930, and he and his wife, Barb, a retired nurse who worked at the Golden Hospital for many years, still live in the same house. So he’s been around a while and can remember what life was like in this small town in earlier years.
“I felt quite safe and knew everyone. It was a great little town! There were very few cars in the 1930s. There were some horse-drawn vehicles. I’d go fishing with my friends or by myself. Radio reception in those days was not reliable at all.”
I asked Ed what he would do on a typical day in the summertime when he was out of school.
“Well, we would go swimming in the Kicking Horse River, or we’d go watch for the trains,” Ed remembers vividly when there were three trains each way, every day, in the late ’30s, ’40s, and much of the ’50s.
“You knew all the train schedules. Two each way arrived in the daytime, and another one each way around 4 or 5 in the morning.”
The arrival of each one of the daytime trains was a people-watching event at the train station. And then, of course, the train station was heated, so in the winter, the kids could go to the station and warm up.
“And one time we were watching when the train came in and when it stopped, some armed guards got off first, and then a whole bunch of Japanese people got off and were walking up and down the walkway.
They were some of the Japanese people who were moved away from the coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and they had lost everything that they had on the coast.”
Someone who didn’t live in Golden could easily think that it was a little town at the end of Highway 95 and pretty much isolated. The Trans-Canada Highway was still years away, and a trip to Field could often take a couple of hours. The road east was full of potholes and washboards and covered with rocks and dust.
“They took us to Field in 1939 to see the Queen. They had us in the back of a truck, and with all the exhaust and dust, many of us were sick by the time we got there.
We had the trains running both east and west, so we could jump on the train any time we wanted to. You could take the train all the way, and a lot of people, especially those who went to Vancouver, took their car on the train as well. There was a special train coach for cars and a ramp by the tracks where people could drive their car onto the train, and then they had it at the other end.
You could get on the train at 4 in the morning in Golden and be in Calgary by about 1 pm, shop until 7 pm, then get on the train and be back in Golden by 4 the next morning. No, we didn’t feel isolated!”
Then, in those early years, it was still many years away from concrete sidewalks, so wooden sidewalks were still common, and they too were an important part of a youngster’s life.
“When we were kids and needed a nickel, we didn’t bother trying to get it from our parents because there wasn’t much chance of getting it there. What we did was go downtown to the wooden sidewalks and crawl underneath them because when someone dropped some change on the sidewalk, it often fell through the cracks in the boards, and we kids were small enough to crawl underneath.
The grown-ups couldn’t get under there. So we’d pick up the nickels and dimes that had fallen through. Even pennies- you could buy some candy for two cents then. We would do it in twos, one of us crawling and the other looking out for cranky adults. When somebody came along, the lookout told the other one to keep quiet.”
Ed was a railway man himself, working for the CPR in many different capacities, but he lost interest when the steam engines changed to diesel in the ’50s and went on to other things.
So the passenger trains and the wooden sidewalks and the stories that we tell about them are mostly gone here in ’25 and Golden, as it did in earlier years, will continue to change with time. One of those changes will be a bridge, built of iron and concrete, replacing one of iron and wood, which, in turn, had replaced one of wood.
And while we’ll be happy to drive the new bridge and have accepted that the passenger trains and wooden sidewalks are gone, let’s hold onto the old stories and make new ones as we go along.
